Skip to the Loo

There was a three-word sentence that gut-punched me one day. 

I was at a soccer tournament in another town and needed to use the bathroom. 

A concrete room.  

One rusty sink. 

Two stalls. 

No soap.

No paper towel holders. 

No bathroom mirror.

Pretty dark and dingy. 

But when you have to go ... you go. 

And in the going, I discovered something. 
As mentioned above, there was no bathroom mirror. 
In a women's bathroom. 

Pre-teen girls group together and visit the loo, peeking into the mirror to check their faces; teenage girls visit between games and glance into the mirror to fix braids that came undone in game-play; a young woman looks at the mirror, touching up some make-up; a middle-aged woman comes in and readjusts the pull of her clothing; an older woman, who was there to watch her granddaughter play, steps up to the mirror and marvels at the image looking back at her. 

  

But.

There was no mirror.

There was that three-word sentence instead. 

Upon gazing at the spot on the wall where the mirror should have been, women are met with a bold statement. 

You. Are. Beautiful. 

Although, in this case, it's "beutiful".

Beautiful is spelled wrong. 

And isn't that how it goes?

Who defines beauty?

Who gets to say if someone is or is not beautiful?

Beautiful is often 'spelled' wrong.

Society has been mistaken for ... well, forever. 

Looking at things, measuring things, judging things based on opinions from movies, or magazines, or Hollywood, from make-up, jewelry, and clothing. Seeing workout videos, women at the gym, women on the beach. Hearing the guys talk about the ones who are "10s", and the ones who are not. I remember walking down a high school hallway between classes once, and I just escaped walking past a lineup of guys who were calling out numbers, rating the girls who passed by. I was horrified. I was able to duck into my English classroom, but the other girl wasn't.

Who gave them permission to determine her beauty? 

Oh, but she heard. Loud and clear. Cemented into her mind. Painfully chiseled into her heart. 

And when she went into the bathroom, red-faced and embarrassed, she looked in the mirror. And it told her the same thing. 

You. Are. Not. Beautiful. 

Translation ... you are ugly, you are fat, you are not valuable, you are not liked, you are not pretty, you are not enough.

Heartbreaking.

You see, beautiful was being spelled incorrectly through it all.

And that mirror.

If she looked in the mirror, thinking that beauty was absent, then beauty was not seen. 

Oh, it was there. She just didn't see it. 

She may have stuck her tongue out at the mirror and moved on as quickly as she could. 

But then this soccer field ladies' room.

No mirror.

But there was beauty in that dingy place.

The pre-teens, the teenagers, the young women, the middle-aged women, the older women ... they all brought the beauty in there with them. 

Instead of seeing pimples, seeing fix-ups, seeing messy, seeing rolls, seeing lines, they saw beauty. 

And they smiled.

"You are beutiful!"

A forty-four year old woman came into the bathroom and stared. 
She didn't see the mirror.

It stopped her in her tracks.

Because what she did see were the words, "You are beutiful!"

A tear rolled down her cheek. 

Because she had never believed it to be true. 

A three-word sentence on a concrete wall at a soccer field reached her heart. 

There is hope.

There is beauty.

And it's in you, it's on you, it's for you. 

When we begin to 'spell' it right, beautiful really, truly, is beautiful. 

And when we 'spell' it right, we see it right. 

You.

Are. 
Beautiful.

Truth is truth.